And so what could Cicely do? And time went on, carryin' Paul further and further down the road that has but one ending. Lower and lower he sunk, carryin' her heart, her happiness, her life, down with him.
And they said one cold night Paul didn't come home at all, and Cicely and his mother wus half crazy; and they wus too proud, to the last, to tell the servants more than they could help: so, when it got to be most mornin', them two delicate women started out through the deep snow, to try to find him, tremblin' at every little heap of snow that wus tumbled up in the path in front of 'em; tremblin' and sick at heart with the agony and dread that wus rackin' their souls, as they would look over the cold fields of snow stretching on each side of the road, and thinkin' how that face would look if it wus lying there staring with lifeless eyes up towards the cold moonlight,—the face they had kissed, the face they had loved,—and thinkin', too, that the change that had come to it—was comin' to it all the time—was more cruel and hopeless than the change of death.
So they went on, clear to the saloon; and there they found him,—there he lay, perfectly stupid, and dead with liquor.
And they both, the broken-hearted mother and the broken-hearted wife, with the tears running down their white cheeks, besought the saloon-keeper to let him alone from that night.
The mother says, “Paul is so good, that if you did not tempt him, entice him here, he would, out of pity to us, stop his evil ways.”
And the saloon-keeper was jest as polite as any man wus ever seen to be,—took his hat off while he told 'em, so I hearn, “that he couldn't go against his own interests: if Paul chose to spend his money there, he should take it.”
“Will you break our hearts?” cried the mother.
“Will you ruin my husband, the father of my boy?” sobbed out Cicely, her big, sorrowful eyes lookin' right through his soul—if he had a soul.
And then the man, in a pleasant tone, reminded 'em,—
“That it wuzn't him that wus a doin' this. It wus the law: if they wanted things changed, they must look further than him. He had a license. The great Government of the United States had sold him, for a few dollars, the right to do just what he was doing. The law, and all the respectability that the laws of our great and glorious Republic can give, bore him out in all his acts. The law was responsible for all the consequenses of his acts: the men were responsible who voted for license—it was not him.”